Friday Favorite: Val Britton 02/03/2012
This Friday’s Feature artist is Val Britton! I love the intricacy of her worldscape series and admire her deeply personal motivation for her work. From her artist statement: I make immersive, collaged works on paper that draw on the language of maps. The impetus for this body of work was my longing to connect to my father, a truck driver who drove eighteen-wheelers across the country; he died when I was a teenager. Based on road maps of the United States, routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works on paper help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know. My mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces. Painting through staining, seepage, and absorption becomes a metaphor for the fluidity of remembering, mimicking the geologic layers that constitute memories. Traveling, navigating routes, mapping our experiences, making choices at a crossroads, viewing purpose as a destination: these common metaphors link experiencing life with the notion of a journey. In my work I often think about how the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and how the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.  worldscape I, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 43 x 43 inches  worldscape II, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 4.5 x 5 feet  worldscape III, 2010, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 9 x 9 feet  worldscape VI, 2011, paper construction with ink and tape, approximately 38 x 30 inches To find out more about Val Britton and her work, visit her website! TGIF! Mary^ Comments02/03/2012 7:33am
I love how she came to create her art, and what she says about it: 02/03/2012 9:48am
Excellent feature! I love the "mapping our experiences" and so much of what she says. Beautiful art to top it all off! Keeping It Indie 02/03/2012 11:06am
You always find the most interesting geometric artwork. The texture and depth in this work is so amazing. Lovely. geckostone 02/05/2012 8:59am
Wow, Val's art is brilliant and I love her statement! What a way to think of maps, I love it!!! Leave a Reply | About Me
I am a painter and art educator living in the Greater St. Louis Area. I love creating mixed-media paintings layered with maps and geologic drawings. This blog is a place for me to share my work and what inspires me. Read more here.  Follow me? Interested in buying my art?
You will always see my most recent paintings here on my blog, so you are in the right place. If you are ever interested in a piece, feel free to contact me. You can also find my work at Wood Icing, The Little Gallery at Art Saint Louis, Artlandish Gallery, and Etsy!     Grab my button  
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